


Cipher

by megazorzz



Category: Persona 3, Persona 3 Portable - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Birthday, Canon Compliant, Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Not Beta Read, Spoilers, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:41:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29068971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megazorzz/pseuds/megazorzz
Summary: Aigis can't sleep. It is her birthday.
Relationships: Aigis/Arisato Minako, Aigis/Persona 3 Protagonist
Comments: 1
Kudos: 35





	Cipher

Aigis had started staying up all night. Before her birth, it was something she could achieve quite easily. There were simply no tasks to be done and so she could easily slip into stand-by mode, only factually aware of the passage of time on her internal clock. She could be sitting or standing. It really didn’t matter. She was not programmed initially to feel tired. The closest thing was the haptic feedback she would receive if her core’s battery was beginning running low. After that, even with low-to-moderate levels of combat, it would take days for it to fully deplete its reserve power.

  
But now she felt tired. She could not enter sleep mode. In a few moments, the aperture of the lighting would begin gracing the surface of all the photos she had accumulated, beginning with the scarlet ribbon that coiled around the corkboard’s frame, held in place by strategic barrettes. The slideshow of sorts began with a photo of her and Yukari moving into their third-year dormitory. Junpei and Fuuka quickly followed: a pleasing photo of Fuuka at the stove preparing a meal Aigis could not fully ingest and Junpei during his first big baseball game. An hour later, photos of her former senpai basked in dull blue light. Mitsuru stood imposingly at a podium, formally accepting her role and function in front of her father’s former employees and administrators. She could make out a gold medal slung over Akihiko’s neck, his temple bruised and smile soft. Ken held Koromaru clumsily beneath Koromaru’s front legs outside of his new middle school.

  
Then would come her corner. It was like clockwork. Night after night the moon would crest in the sky, illuminating the same series of events. But every time Minako’s face would appear from out of the shadow, Aigis would wince in shock.

  
Her headphones dangled precariously from a hook. Her stunned face as Junpei tripped in what they thought would be a photo commemorating the end of the Dark Hour came first. How naïve they were. How worried Minako was—even in the mundane interior of their dormitory—for Junpei’s well-being. Her patience knew no bounds. Nor did her dedication and hard work. Several shots of Minako in her various clubs and committees wreathed about an image Aigis had grown to hate. It was something she did not understand. Why should she hate something she so clearly held close to her heart? What was wrong with her?

  
Aigis closed her eyes. She was weary, but whatever mirror of sleep she had developed would not come. She supposed it was only natural. She was not meant to sleep. It was not among the three modes of activity she had been created to follow: stand-by, combat, stasis. Aigis leered at the largest of Minako’s photos. Aigis was Prometheus, cast into shadow by her own hubris. She had reached out and grasped the flame, but no she stood alone, darkness threatening to swallow her as she held this slowly dimming torch, unsure of how to feed or fuel it, how to nurture it into the blazing sun that hung in the sky for her to foolishly pluck and squander.

  
It was her fault, Aigis concluded. She did not have the experience of pain to realize how foolish it was to create such an image. She had begged and begged Mitsuru to help her. Finally caving in, Mitsuru and her specialists connected Aigis’ translated her back-up footage into images. And so that day, the happiest in Aigis’ memory banks, was printed on glossy paper and pinned to a cork board that she and Yukari had decorated together.

  
The day she confessed to Minako, she knew she could never go back. Her internal cameras cast the event into harsh clarity. She had made such overtures about having come to understand the cycle of impermanence and loss to her Minako. She had crossed the chasm between programming and subroutines into thought and feeling. And Minako had held her hand, warming it from that brisk day in January. Minako was smiling. She was smiling and holding her hand. Despite her revelations, nothing would compare to the aftermath. Aigis could talk about the beauty of the cycle or the meaning of bonds and connections, but now she had come out on the other side while Minako braved the inevitable.  


And now she had a high school diploma and a simulacrum of humanity’s pain and no way to undo this terrible sensation. She was tired.

She reached back and felt the core at the nape of her neck. If she squinted her eyes and focused, she could run operations to detect the hints of remaining residue from the natural oils of her hands. Natural grooves were worn into the metal where the simple forces of her biology dissolved the protective coating, leaving it open and raw to the cold air. She overlaid and highlighted the swirling lines, recreating the fingerprint of Minako’s right hand. Over and over again she did this. Why did her own hands have to be so resilient to the elements? She could have done the same with Minako’s palm and her graceful fingers had they imprinted on her hand that day, tracing the lines of calluses that rose after her handling of her naginata or the ridged handle of her tennis racket. Both were so diametrically opposed, but Aigis knew humans were made up of countless beautiful contradictions. Yet now Aigis only felt like a discrete element, uniform in composition throughout. She was neither a human nor a machine, but a sunken shadow of her former self.

  
Despite herself, she couldn’t bring her eyes away from Minako’s smile, even after the moon had passed on to other things. Soon the sun was up. Her physical processes were running optimally, but her mind was still in a haze.

  
There was a quick knock on her door. “It’s me,” Mitsuru said. “May I come in?”

  
Aigis summoned the strength to rise out of bed and opened the door. Mitsuru, already dressed and made up for the day stood there holding a small cake in both hands.

  
“Good morning, Aigis. And…happy birthday.”

  
“Mitsuru…”

  
She entered and placed the cake on Aigis’ desk. She glanced at the cork board and smiled sorrowfully. “I know you can’t really handle food, but I thought I would have the chef whip one up regardless. It’s small, so we don’t need to worry about wasting food,” she said.

  
“I can’t believe I had already forgotten,” Aigis said. “Of all the days in the world to forget.”

  
“I don’t blame you,” Mitsuru answered. She cut a slice and handed it to Aigis. “March is…always difficult isn’t it?”

  
Aigis didn’t reply. She gazed at the strawberries and the frosting. Minako had always loved red.

  
“I apologize. You went to all this effort and I’m…I’m just not feeling up to celebrating.”

  
“That’s quite alright. There is no one way that you should feel today.”

  
“Tell me, Mitsuru. What should I do? I feel this tightness in my chest every time I think of her. And lately I’ve…been thinking terrible things.”

  
“Oh? Do you want to share?”

  
“I feel like…I feel like blaming her. And then I feel such guilt. It’s not her fault. I know for a fact that none of this is her fault. She didn’t mean for me to feel this pain or suffer this way. But then I think…she is the cause of it. Minako…she’s marked me. Permanently. And…and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I still can’t help but feel angry. I know that’s not okay. It’s not right. I say that out loud to myself so many times, yet the resentment lingers. How? How can I reconcile these two positions?”

  
Mitsuru set her plate on Aigis’ desk. The sun was bright today. She sat for a long time, ruminating over Minako’s photo.

  
“You can’t.”

  
“I…can’t? That's your answer?”

  
“At the end of the day we are only human. We don’t make sense. It is not in our nature. Despite our best intentions or in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we feel what we feel.”

  
“I don’t understand.”

  
“I think you do. Tell me, why was it that you chose this day of all days?”

  
“For my birthday?”

  
“You could have chosen any number of dates: the day your AI was complete, the manufacture of your body, or the fusion of both elements. And yet you chose March 5. The day that brought everyone so much pain…yet brought us all together as dearest friends, even if it was in mourning.”

  
Sitting on that stone bench on the school rooftop, Minako’s head in her lap, thinking that they were about to celebrate some unambiguous and complete victory over despair was where Aigis had realized she was fully human. It was a birthday of sorts, to her. Aigis invariably and unknowingly accepted everything that came with the territory.

"I chose it...to honor her. Her influence and her kindness changed everyone around her. None of us, not even a machine, could escape it. She facilitated this rebirth in me. I suppose I wanted to honor her in this way. Even if it does not change anything or if birthdays are supposed to be happy occasions. Are you saying that it is okay to harbor these feelings? Even if they do not fit together?”

  
“It is an inevitable part of life. It is what it is. You said so yourself to Minako, did you not?” Mitsuru delicately picked up her silver fork and tasted the cake. “With my own father’s death, I’ve grappled with some of the same things. I won’t say everything, however. It is difficult to map out with any precision. Grief’s architecture is different for each person, Aigis. It doesn’t end. It just changes. The floors and rooms shift. The walls open and doorways shut. What was simple one night is labyrinthine the next. This idea may not bring you comfort. However, it is the best I can do.”

  
Aigis examined Mitsuru's face. The mention of her father still caused her to wince, despite the strong visage she carefully maintained. It didn't take a machine to see that. “No…you said it well, Mitsuru. Just knowing that it is a struggle shared by all in their own way.”

  
Aigis looked out of the window. It was already spring—her third one. Day by day, or rather, step by step, grief was a constant climb, tended to every night and reconsidered every morning. Aigis found herself on a winding towering staircase that was ever stretching up toward the sky. Despite the daunting nature of the task, she had a torch that she could not let go of and a grazing hand on her back pushing her up. Though she could not see Minako’s hands on hers nor confirm it with her processors, she knew that this is where they touched, memory abstracted and etched onto her heart as opposed to circuitry. Perhaps it was okay to stumble on that staircase as well. Maybe sometimes Aigis wouldn’t be able to sleep. And that was okay. Other times, perhaps, she could dream and wake warm and refreshed, if wistful. She might not ever be able to tell when one would occur over the other. She was not programmed to do this. She could never find the full answer. But that was okay in this moment, even if later, in fits and starts, it wouldn't feel that way. "When you fall, get right back up."

  
Minako was present and absent at the same time. The gift of humanity was rejoicing in these wonderful contradictions, Aigis realized. And so, she picked up her fork, attempting to interpret the list of ingredients and chemical reactions in the cake as a flavor, a sensation marking her brain and her memory with this image as well, of a person who gave a machine a warm bed and a freshly baked cake. It didn't have to make sense. It only had to feel right. This gift was something Aigis could never have received without these contradictory feelings. Minako was both present and absent, indexed onto every part of her metallic chassis and the amorphous and intangible thing that was the human heart.

  
“This is delicious, Mitsuru,” Aigis said quietly. "Compliments to the chef."

"I'm glad. Happy birthday, Aigis."


End file.
